Poisoning Weiss #4
Was it TB or some other deadly bacteria?
September 17, continued
Incurable disease
Here, at long last, comes the real revelation:
That Dr. Weiss had a disposition to morbid ideas, it showed itself a few years ago, when he was suddenly seized by a delusion that he had the germ of an incurable disease that he was studying,
Possibly, like most of the information provided by Freud in the letter to his fiancé, as well as in the articles, this information about Nathan's fears is fictional. Since, Freud started to work in Nathan's hospital first in July 1882, after having been dismissed from Brücke's Institute of Physiology, it is unlikely that he would have known much about Nathan's past.
As the author further explained, although this Idea, according to the opinion of outstanding medical authorities, was completely unfounded, it seems, in the last few days it suddenly appeared in him again.
But what, if this time, the idea wasn't completely unfounded? What if this time it wasn't a delusion? What if this time, Nathan had really been infected with the germ of an incurable disease?
Now, at last, we are told the real reason why Nathan committed suicide.
This could have been the immediate impulse for his decision to commit suicide that otherwise would be completely inexplicable and puzzling.
Thus, it wasn't his heartbreak that was the cause of Nathan's suicide, but the realisation aka "delusion", that he was infected by a deadly germ.
Would Nathan really commit a suicide because of a delusion, or was he convinced, and certain, that he had been infected and already doomed? After all, as an outstanding doctor and medical researcher, he would have been able to diagnose himself.
The author didn't reveal the source of this information about Nathan's germ "delusion". And it is unlikely that Nathan would have shared this information with him. So, how could he have known, unless it was he who was responsible for Nathan's deadly infection?
As the author explained,
For the young widow, the terrible blow is so painful, and even more shocking, since she lost her husband as a result of such a sad delusion, of whose existence she and her family had no idea.
So, neither the wife not her family knew about the "delusion". And if so, then how did the author of the article learned about it?
But what it wasn't a delusion? What if, this time, the deadly infection was real? What if, realising his dire situation, rather than infecting his wife and her family, Nathan committed suicide?
When did Nathan get infected? Since he came back happy from the honeymoon, he must have been infected shortly after his return to work.
What confirms this idea is the fact that, Only a few days before his death, a depression became noticeable in him, which occurred quite unmotivated, and can only be explained by the confusion of his mind.
Or maybe his depression wasn't unmotivated; maybe it can only be explained by the realisation that he was already infected and doomed.
September 23
Bereavement thanks
to the many, on the occasion of the passing of our most beloved, unfortunate, son and brother,
Dr Nathan Weiss,
lecturer in internal medicine, and head of the outpatient department for electrical treatment, in the k.k. hospital.
We express our sincere and most heartfelt thanks to all friends and acquaintances, from near and afar, who stood by our side, comforting us, in these sad days.
Vienna, 23 September 1883.
The deeply grieving bereaved.
It takes an unusually brazen criminal to openly in his writings reveal what exactly happened to his victim.
Suicide or murder?
Did Nathan Weiss commit suicide, or was he murdered? Even though Freud, hiding under the cover of the mysterious correspondent, hinted at alleged reasons for Nathan’s suicide, there’s no doubt that Nathan had all the reasons to live and none to die.
Notably, both in his letter to Martha, and in the articles, about Nathan's death, Freud lied about Nathan’s “unhappy” marriage as the cause for Nathan’s suicide.
Why would he do that? Was he trying to impress his fiancé with his literary latent, or did he have some other ulterior motive? Was he in that way inventing an alibi for himself? It wouldn't be out of character for Freud, taking into account his cocaine-induced paranoia.
Could Freud have murdered Weiss? But if so, how did he manage that task?
Freud’s confession
The answer is to be found in Freud’s confession contained in one of his lectures, in which, hiding under the moniker of Mr. H., Freud explained his, indeed, ingenious killing method. (Considering the fact that Nathan committed suicide, there’s no doubt that he wasn’t delusional but had really been infected with a deadly pathogen.)
This is how Freud did it! This is his confession!
You may perhaps remember the case of a murderer, H., who found the means of obtaining cultures of highly dangerous pathogenic organisms from scientific institutes by representing himself as a bacteriologist. He then used these cultures for the purpose of getting rid of his near connections by this most modern of methods.
As a matter of fact, there's never been a murderer H., but there have been a murderous Dr F. (Freud) A layman wouldn't be able to obtain deadly pathogenic bacteria but a doctor Freud would.
Now on one occasion this man complained to the Directors of one of these institutes that the cultures that had been sent to him were ineffective; but he made a slip of the pen, and instead of writing ‘in my experiments on mice or guinea-pigs’ he wrote quite clearly ‘in my experiments on men’.
And the obvious question to ask is, how could Freud, unless he was the mysterious H., have known all those details of the latter's correspondence with the directors of the institute.
The doctors at the institute were struck by the slip, but, so far as I know, drew no conclusions from it. Well, what do you think? Should not the doctors, on the contrary, have taken the slip of the pen as a confession and started an investigation which would have put an early stop to the murderer’s activities?
... a slip of the pen like this would certainly have seemed to me most suspicious; [it] was certainly a piece of circumstantial evidence; but it was not enough in itself to start an investigation. *
So, this is how Freud obtained the pathogenic bacteria that he intended to use, and used, on his “friends”.
* SE 15, pp. 69-70. Lecture IV on Parapraxes (Slips of the Tongue), 1915-1917.
Poisoning Nathan
Now that we know that Freud had the means, Freud will tell us who was on the receiving end of his poisonous cocktail. So, how can we know that Dr Freud used those pathogens on Nathan? Freud himself brazenly provided an obvious hint at the end of the passage containing his confession, referring the reader to page 57. [Freud wrote: Cf. p. 57 f. above.] (Cf stands for compare)
This is how, on the page 57, Freud revealed about whom he poisoned with these pathogenic organisms writing:
I was once the guest of a young married couple and heard the young woman laughingly describe her latest experience.
Who that married couple, whose name Freud didn’t reveal, was, will soon be apparent from the continuation of his story.
The day after her return from the honeymoon she had called for her unmarried sister to go shopping with her as she used to do, while her husband went to his business.
Without doubt, it was Nathan and his wife that was the married couple that returned from the honeymoon.
This is what Freud claimed happened next,
Suddenly she noticed a gentleman on the other side of the street, and nudging her sister had cried: ‘Look, there goes Herr L.’
As Freud absurdly wrote,
She had forgotten that this gentleman had been her husband for some weeks.
In fact, the young couple's honeymoon only lasted a couple of weeks, which confirms that Freud is talking about Nathan's marriage.
This is a bizarre, sick, typically Freudian, claim. Of course, under normal circumstances, one doesn’t forget the person once married only a short while ago. Thus, this is not a statement of a fact, but a Freudian clue.
What Freud meant will be apparent reading the continuation of Freud’s fable. Thus, Freud wrote,
I shuddered as I heard the story, but I did not dare to draw the inference.
And since Freud shuddered, the hint is obvious. The fact that the wife allegedly didn’t recognise her husband meant that already, the day after his return from the honeymoon, Nathan was a dead person, and, rather than seeing her husband, she was seeing his ghost (a dead man walking).
And Freud confirmed that he was talking about Nathan’s suicide, stating that, The little incident only occurred to my mind some years later when the marriage had come to a most unhappy end.
Most definitely, Nathan’s marriage came to a most unhappy end, and only ten days after his return from the honeymoon. And the most unhappy end was Nathan’s suicide committed by him because he had been poisoned by Freud, with the pathogenic organisms obtained by Freud from the scientific institutes of Vienna.
Freud even provided the timing of Nathan's poisoning which took place, the day after her return from the honeymoon, thus on the very day she allegedly didn't recognise her husband.
As recounted earlier, Freud had the motives, and he had the means.
Notably, in the earlier translation of this story, appearing in the Lecture 4 of Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psycho Analysis of 1922, translated by Joan Riviere, the woman said, Look, there goes Mr. K. rather than, as in the later translation, Look, there goes Mr. L.”
Why Freud would change the initial of the husband’s name is anyone’s guess. Without a doubt, Freud's play on letters confirms the fact that the whole story about the wife not recognising her husband was a clue about the identity of his victim. Notably, even though the 1922 version, on page 45, contains a passage about Freud's visit to the married couple, the passage about murderer H., doesn't have a reference to it. This link is only provided in Strachey's translation, appearing in the 1953's edition, of Freud's complete works. Apparently, over time, Freud decided that it was safe for him to reveal there was a causal connection between murderer H. and Nathan's suicide.
How many more of his “friends” Freud may have killed with this pathogens will never be known. Although it is not improbable that both of Freud's dead "friends', his love rival, Ignaz Schönberg, and his scientific competitor, Josef Paneth - both of whom got infected - allegedly with TB - during the same period as Nathan - had been subjected to the same murderous pathogenic treatment. Why kill only one "friend", if one can kill three?
Notably, the German version of the passage recounting the story of the murderer H., doesn't contain the passage recounting Freud's visit to a married (Weiss) couple. This is not unexpected since, as a matter of course, Freud was more cautious when it came to providing hints about his murderous deeds in the German versions of his “works”.
** Freud, Sigmund, Introductory lectures on Psycho-Analysis: A Course of Twenty-Eight Lectures Delivered at the University of Vienna by Prof. Sigmund Freud, m.d., LL. Authorised English translation by Joan Riviere. (1922, pp. 55-56).
The End.